The Maintainer’s Paradox: Balancing Project and Community

What are some of the challenges open source project maintainers face? One common issue is “The Maintainer’s Paradox,” which refers to the fact that open source maintainers are presented with more ideas along with more challenges as their communities grow. This occurs even when they take very minor patches from contributors. This topic was recently tackled by Tim Bird, Senior Software Engineer at Sony, in a keynote address at the Embedded Linux Conference.

Bird is the maintainer of theFuego test system, which provides a framework for testing embedded Linux. During his keynote, he provided examples of challenges that maintainers face, within the context of maintaining Fuego.